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Who Owns SunTrust Banks?

A look at the biggest institutional and inside investors in SunTrust Banks.

When it comes to investing, going with the crowd will rarely -- if ever -- make you rich. If your objective is to buy low and sell high, then, in the words of Warren Buffett, you must be "greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy." This is the foundation of contrarian investing.

But there's a twist. To be a contrarian investor, you must first know what to be contrary to. And this is where the SEC's invaluable EDGAR database comes in. Every quarter, companies and large institutional investors are required to disclose their equity holdings. By patching these together, we can get a fuller picture of a particular stock's popularity.

What follows, in turn, is a look at the principal owners of SunTrust Banks' (NYSE:STI) outstanding common stock.

A broad overviewAs you can see in the following chart, the majority of SunTrust's 532 million shares are held by institutional investors. Company insiders, including board members and corporate executives, own a further 0.35% of the outstanding common stock. And the public at large owns the remaining 16%.

Source: S&P's Capital IQ.

Institutional investorsDigging in a big further, the largest institutional stakeholders in SunTrust are bond giant BlackRock, the asset management division of State Street, T. Rowe Price Group, The Vanguard Group, and Dodge & Cox.

Source: S&P's Capital IQ.

The largest buyers have been Franklin Resources and Cramer Rosenthal McGlynn, which have recently acquired 6.8 million and 3.2 million shares of common stock, respectively. Meanwhile, the two largest sellers of late have been Goldman Sachs(NYSE:GS) and T. Rowe Price Group, which have disposed of 5.7 million and 3.7 million shares, respectively.

Biggest insidersTurning to inside investors, the largest inside owner is James Wells III, the former CEO, followed by a pair of directors. The bank's current CEO, William Henry Rogers Jr., is fourth on the list with 111,245 shares.

Source: S&P's Capital IQ.

The Foolish bottom lineWhile insider and institutional ownership together represent only one metric, it's nevertheless an important one. Beyond hinting at the overall market's sentiment toward a stock, it also gives investors insight into the confidence of the people best positioned to predict a company's current state and future success.